Opening of New Fogg Museum Monday Culminates Era of Advancement in the Field of Fine Arts

There is no more significant or impressive event taking place during Commencement Week than the opening of the new Fogg Art Museum on Monday, the ceremonies beginning at 11 o'clock in the open courtyard in the center of the building with President Lowell presiding. Following the exercises at which Bishop William Lawrence '71 will read the prayer, and Professor C. H. Grandgent '83 will deliver a poem, the entire building will be thrown open to the inspection of the guests, and a plan whose beginnings stretch back to the beginnings of the teaching of Fine Arts at Harvard will come to fulfillment.

Beginning with the work of Professor Charles Eliot Norton, the early apostle and pioneer in the field of Fine Arts in the University, under whose guidance the old Fogg Art Museum Building, the gift of Mrs. William Hayes Fogg of New York as a memorial to her husband, was erected, an era of rapid advancement has culminated in the construction of the new Fogg Museum on the southwest corner of Quincy Street. Directly the new Fogg Museum is a result of the $2,000,000 raised in 1924 to build a new Museum and to provide for it an endowment of $1,000,000.

Interior Pivots on Court

The actual, plans for the new Fogg Museum matured over a period of ten years. It is primarily a combination of a teaching museum with an actual museum. It is designed to meet the varying and exacting requirements of classroom, gallery, library, laboratory, studio, print room, and museum. Important as the exterior of the new Fogg is, it is the interior which makes it one of the most remarkable and exemplary places of museum architecture in America. The pivot and center of the building is a great court bordered on three sides by arcades and on the fourth by a grill behind which are situated a number of cubicles and private studies connecting with the library. The court is "the ideal of the Museum expressed in stone." H. R. Shepley '09, in his designing of this court, spent a number of months abroad.

To the right of the court as one enters, and at the end of the west arcade, is the so-called Great Hall, a full two stories in height, and lighted on the eastern side by three large windows. The ceiling of the Great Hall is an acquired masterpiece of French workmanship, a dark, heavily-beamed, sixteenth century ceiling from Dijon. The whole of the ceiling is richly carved. A small second-floor balcony and a number of windows on the west side, at an eye's level above a concealed passage, permit a close inspection of the whole. In the west passage leading to the Great Hall a bust of Professor Charles Eliot Norton has been placed in a niche, the gift of his pupil, Dr. James Loeb '88.

Externally the Museum building is of red brick. The facade, which fronts on Quincy Street, and which has been called "Twentieth Century Cambridge" in style, is a modern adaptation of the best in Georgian architecture. Viewing it from the shallow quadrangle formed by Emerson, Sever, and Robinson Halls, one is impressed not so much by its magnitude and line as by the open expanse of skylight and the suggestion of a bright, shadowless interior.